Baseball Best-Sellers, May 30

Caveat 1: Print editions only (at least for now); because I’m old school.

Caveat 2: Since the rankings are updated every hour, these lists might not longer be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them. But it’ll be close enough for government work.

Caveat 3: Sometimes they’ll try to pull one over on you and include a book within a category that doesn’t belong. I’m using my discretion to eliminate such titles from my list. For example, for some reason a recent listing included Tarnished Heels: How Unethical Actions and Deliberate Deceit at the University of North Carolina Ended the “The Carolina Way”, which, far as I can tell, is not at all about baseball, at least not in the main. For the sake of brevity, I will be omitting the subtitles, which have become ridiculously long in in some cases in recent years, also at my discretion.

The Closer, by Mariano Rivera with Wayne Coffey. This moves down to #7 on the NY Times‘ hardcover non-fiction list dated June 1. It debuted at #3 last week. Look for my review tonight on Bookreporter.com.

A Nice Little Place on the North Side, by George F. Will

Pete Rose: An American Dilemma, by Kostya Kennedy (Bookshelf Conversation)

NEW!
Free 501 checklist available (Excel/spreadhseet format). Makes it fun to check off which books you've read and handy to bring to the bookstore or library to get what you still want to read. Send your request via email to ronkaplansbaseballbookshelf (@)gmail(dot)com.

Ron by Roth

In my "day job," I'm the features and sports editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper. I'm also the editor of the Bibliography Committee Newsletter for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

I did a piece on the award-winning cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.